


in the dawn, we shall enter the splendid cities.

by Aphoride



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Asexual Enjolras, Asexual Relationship, Bisexual Grantaire, Community: HPFT, Genderfluid Jehan, In which Enjolras consents to try him, Just to see, M/M, Mentions of alcoholism, Mixed race Grantaire, Painter Grantaire, Self-Discovery, Student Enjolras, holiday fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-05 03:18:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14035032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aphoride/pseuds/Aphoride
Summary: Advent is a time for hoping, for waiting, for believing; a time when gods descend to the earth, and the celestial is made temporal.A shame then, that Grantaire believed in nothing but Enjolras.Or, Grantaire lit four red candles, one each Sunday of Advent; each time, he was visited by a god: a god who performed miracles.





	in the dawn, we shall enter the splendid cities.

in the dawn, we shall enter the splendid cities.

 

_I_

 

"I have never realised how much I love the scent of peppermint," he breathed behind you, birthing a grin which twisted at the edge of your mouth; Hephaestus' smile, broken in two places from falls long ago, cast out and banished - though not from some lofty peak as Olympus, however fiercely you might claim it. Small marks, only - almost insignificant, as everything about you is almost insignificant: nothing like the lattices of scars which adorn the faces of people too strong to die when the pox comes.

 

That you were spared, at least - if nothing else.

 

It was not unfamiliar to you, the cold, clear scent of it biting through to your senses with quick, clawing teeth - indeed, it was more familiar to you than you would care to admit, in ways you would not dare to mention even in jest; not even to him, he who was lying in your bed, wearing your clothes, with the faint marks of your kisses down his neck and licks of peppermint oil still sticky along his thighs. It is one thing to raise a man to be a god, to vow to black his boots, to honour him, deify him, to adore him openly enough that it has turned and swirled into a jest of sorts, half-pitying and half-laughing; it is another to admit it in short, curt words, underneath the sun's glare.

 

The sun, the sun - oh, the sun, how it burned, how it shone, how you waited endlessly for the hours when it would rise and you would be blessed again, granted the liberty and the gift to behold it. Never for long enough and never in the way you would like, but you had never been a brave man.

 

What was bravery, to one who degrades himself? Bravery is a luxury, you knew that much.

 

The sun had not liked it when you had said that: it had simmered and shimmered and you had burned.

 

Now it was abed, draped in white cotton, golden rays tousled, knotted and curled, a mess of a spun-straw halo; although, perhaps, you thought, it was not quite the same - they were separate, after all, mayhaps you ought to tweak the metaphor...

 

"The sun," you mused out loud. "Or his charioteer?"

 

A drowsy murmur from behind you, unintelligible and fluted, and you do not turn to look; you are fixated: on this, on him, on the painting on the easel in front of you; on the lines of Ancient Greek now scrolling through your head, letter after letter and word after word, lines of poetry you had memorised years ago without thought or rhyme or reason.

 

Instinct, you had claimed to your teachers then, with an insolent earnestness; instinct and nothing else.

 

How right you had been, without even knowing it! A true prophecy, if ever there had been one.

 

Brushing a thumb over the corner of the canvas, you studied the painting. It was not your best - far from it - but then studies of fruit and tall china vases with lines of delicate flowers wound about the rim had never been your forte. This, though, was a request, a commission - a labour, you thought, and stifled your own laugh before it could burble up in your throat - and so you, the good and obedient servant, painted apples in a bone-white bowl and a spray of roses and wildflowers arranged just so.

 

It was not right, though - it was missing the sun, missing that shower of light from somewhere up above, from somewhere on high, cascading down onto the unworthy in a brilliant, blinding rain.

 

You had joked once, in another life, that you would not mind being blind; you had not then seen the sun.

 

All around the top of the vase and the bumps of the apples and pears in the bowl, was reams of blank cream - nothing upon nothing, swaddled in a thick layer of primer that had dried overnight. From the top left or the top right? Which way should the shadows fall, where was the light coming from.

 

Directly behind you, you thought, directly behind you and pushing out all other light: the candles littering the room with a dim, orange-yellow glow, the slender red advent candle in its solid silver holder; even the first bursts of sunlight as dawn arrived, Helios beginning his long slow charge across the sky, were beaten back and down, held at bay by the growing glare of Apollo's wrath.

 

You could feel it, feel it pressing on your back in a pair of pin-prick points; needles, you thought, drawing blood drop by drop by drop.

 

"It is too soon for morning," the mutter came, sleepy and grumpy, evoking a lazy haze with its slow, low timbre; you smiled again, nonetheless, and you were such a fool if ever there was one.

 

You had read the tale of Pygmalion once upon a time - Ovid, and darkly romantic, tragically comic - and you had wondered at how a man, so alive, so vibrant and ripe, could fall for something which did not breathe, did not touch, could not even know the word love.

 

Not a prophecy, that, but hubris. Your own long-time enemy, hubris, finding you again and again just to make certain you stay where you belong: at the bottom of the heap.

 

There was a stirring behind you, a rustling and whistling of sheets and cotton shirts on skin and you selected a paintbrush, clean and spotless, and mixed together dabs of yellow and white, blending them quickly. Then, you raised the brush, decisive and anxious, and pressed a small lick onto the canvas, a streak of colour left behind it, diagonal and flecked.

 

From the left, then.

 

"If it cannot be morning," you commented, idly rinsing the lead off the paintbrush tip. "Perhaps you should run to the window and fling open the curtains so you can confront Helios himself - curse him and demand him to return, so that night stays but a bit longer.

 

After all, Apollo, you are Phoebus yourself - how could he refuse if you commanded?"

 

The sun regarded you for a moment, blue-eyed and red lines creased on his cheek from sleep. You traced them with your eyes, imagining your eyes were your fingers, imagining how he would look at you then, blue-eyed and pink-lipped, clad in white like an offering to a god.

 

Hubris. Again.

 

"Finish your painting," he instructed you with the haughty, demanding tone you knew so well, and you bowed, reverent, smirking when he glared. "To-day I am still."

* * *

_II_

 

On the palette, wooden and frayed around the edges, rough and uneven, bumping here and there with broken butts of wood, leaving shards in the paint you had to pick out with short, deft fingers, the colours swirled as you swept the brush in circles, tight and tight and then blossoming outwards, blue with white and a small smudge of yellow, just enough to make a soft, teal colour, caught somewhere between green and blue, reminding you of the sea, of the way it had sparkled on the African coast; ah, there you went again, lying to yourself - it reminded you of how you thought it looked, how you dreamed it looked, on the frills of your mother's land, the ocean licking at the edges of the land.

 

You had lived in Nice for a while, before you came to Paris, before you ran away, a whelp on the streets, whining and begging, scratching at fleas and scrapping from bins to eat. Like all good dogs, you had gone home to whence you came when the whistle sounded, thrashed and stuffed in a coat and cravat like the son of a gentleman, read your lines like an actor, and sent off to university, to Paris, to become an educated ape.

 

Still, you mixed the colours around absently, lifting the brush to apply a single, delicate strand of paint to the canvas, the brush in your hand slender, puffed out at the end with only a handful of horse-hairs.

 

To-day you were painting dancers from the ballet: tiny, fluted bodies with careful, bell-shaped arms and long skirts, yellow and pink; nymphs in a wood, you had thought, happy and blithe, swaying and posing with sad, romantic eyes and flowers in their hair, a cacophony of purples and whites, pinks and bright, garish reds.

 

It was soft and sweet, tender; an irony, then, that to-day you were none of those things, would be none of those things.

 

Your head still rumbled, boiled and burbled with the dim echoes of the hooves on the cobbles outside, the chimes of church bells only a few hundred feet from your door, aching from more than just the wine, its red stain still lingering on your mouth, the taste of vinegar trailed down your throat like fire; his words still rolled around, rattling like a child's toy, like the beads on a woman's rosary or the clack of an old man's teeth.

 

It had been your fault, you knew, you had forgotten Apollo was so easily angered, so easily whipped to ferocity - twice your fault that you found him beautiful when he glared, blue eyes glittering dark and golden hair asunder; thrice perhaps that you had been naïve enough to think that what you had shared - what you had taken from him, given him, educated him for the first time and the last in - had somehow twisted, morphed his regard for you.

 

The drunkard, Grantaire.

 

Like an avenging angel, he had looked at you, imposing and tall, taller than he had ever been before. Get out, he had said, his voice shaking, ringing, and you could hear nothing else but him, see nothing else but him, think nothing but how could he?; va t'en!

 

Outside, hunched over in the cold, your hat pulled down low over your eyes and your bottle of wine stashed under your coat, as you sat on the steps of the church - sacrilege, to sit somewhere so holy when you are so defiled! but what have you ever cared about sanctity? - Prouvaire had come, their long, sweeping coat soaked at the end with the dregs of the gutter and the dribbling pools of rain, and sat down beside you, staring straight ahead.

 

"Sing, O muse," they had said, solemn and quiet. "Of the rage of Achilles."

 

In the corner, a small cloud of smoke gathered around the head of the advent candle, the stump of the first long removed and pressed into the fold of a scroll; the wick was still white on the second, in these early hours of Monday morning, the church bells singing out their chimes for matins, a merry and clattering clamour.

 

A knock at your door, then, sharp and perfunct; snapped off at the end, the wrist stiff and inflexible. It sounded once, twice, thrice, four times and you stumbled over, closing your eyes and stashing the paintbrush in your pocket, unconcerned with the paint which littered your fingers and your hands, the cuffs of your cream shirt.

 

"You promised to lend me a book," Enjolras told you, and the gentle, halting tone of his voice was discordant, almost unearthly.

 

Words failed you; your tongue lay still and fat in your mouth, and all you could taste was vinegar and the bile from the night before when he had banished you from the Musain.

 

He watched you, studied you with the familiar intensity - the heat of it gone, cooled and deadened, but it still pressed the same, pushed the same, waiting, expectant and impatient, for an answer.

 

His cheeks were a burning, flushed pink you knew went no further than that, did not travel any lower; he was neat and pristine and calm in cobalt blue, his hair dampened with rain, and who were you to condemn him?

 

The door swung shut behind him and he was there, so close to you that you did not dare to breathe, could feel the heat of him in your small, frozen apartment. You could smell cinnamon on him, spices and ink, and a faint undercurrent of rain; he was impossible and improbable and, when he leaned in and kissed you, tentative and shy, you knew that if this was an opiate dream you would die rather than wake.

 

Perhaps you might die anyway, as you slipped an arm around his waist, holding him close, so light you almost did not touch him at all, but what man would wish for a better death?

 

Slowly, the wet tip of the paintbrush burned a teal circle into Enjolras' blue - the blue of France, the blue of Patria, of the republic, but would you have expected anything else? - jacket, and when he saw it, he laughed and you laughed, and he pressed a hand just above your heart.

 

"I would like," he said, slow and steady, and this time, this time it was a question. "To stay."

* * *

_III_

 

His hair fell across your shoulder, long golden strands loose and scattered, dropped onto your shoulders like the sigh of the wind or the slow, languid drift of a gauze curtain, dyed purple and hung, tasselled and old, in the seedier parts of Paris you pretended you did not know and claimed you knew in the same breath.

 

What else could you say, when he approved and disapproved in the same breath, in turn?

 

You would deny him nothing: ardour, loyalty, confrontation... Apollo had ever been a warrior-god, had he not, with his javelins and golden bows, just as much as his sweet, fleet-footed sister had been.

 

Candlelight turned him golden in truth, one of Midas' statues, caressed once down the jawline, a thumb over the arch of his cheekbones and turned, forevermore, into gleaming, cold metal, frozen and unyielding. Your hands skated over his arm in a mockery of that long-ago caress, feather-light and damning, dark in contrast to him, dark, dark, dark; and was that not the honesty you had tried for so long to forget? You and he, night and day; the common ground between you was torn asunder by so many curses and bullets, the bodies of those who had fought for you, fought with you, bystanders caught up in an argument which whipped round and round like a hurricane.

 

Dazzled, still dazed from the earlier kisses, from the way he had allowed your hands to glide over his skin, mapping out the plans and dips and ridges of his body, where his bones jutted up and his muscles bunched, from the way he had looked at you when you had finally, finally pulled away far enough for that stare of his to lock with yours, warm and dark and impossible, you spun his hair through your fingers - making gold, you thought idly, stifling a smirk in the top of his head, making gold out of straw - reaching out to turn a page.

 

Cradled in between your arms, Enjolras frowned; you had knocked him, only a little, and the papers on your chest fluttered, beating away from him on fragile, useless wings.

 

"Be still," he commanded - though there was less heat behind it than normal, less fire and less brimstone; his fingers were light and delicate on your chest, brushing here and there as he gathered the papers together again, tucking them into a single sheaf and settling down to read once more, kneading your arm as a cat kneads his owners' thighs when he deigns to sit.

 

What difference, really? Enjolras rarely deigned to flit to you, arriving as he had that morning at the break of the day, wordless and soundless, asking to be let in only by the way his eyes flickered around your room, the way he hovered in your doorway, waiting and waiting, so feline you would only have blinked once if a slender, honey-yellow tail had curled around his legs, ticking and ticking to and fro.

 

You had fed him milk for lunch, milk and honey and bread and wine, and you had laughed, refusing to explain when he asked.

 

You had tasted it in his mouth when you kissed him, stained sweet, and you had laughed again.

 

Idly, you flicked through page after page, barely skimming through the ink-black words, preferring instead to admire the blue-and-red illustrations, edged with green and faded in places so much so that it looked almost purple, the images warping and distorting as the candle wavered, dancing and shuddering, buffeted back and forth, small and large, by the breezes you created when you flipped through a wad of pages at once.

 

You were not in the mood for reading, for philosophy or religion or politics or history or the reams of revolutionary dreams weaving themselves together inside Enjolras' head; you were rather in the mood for inspiration, searching for something.

 

Your current assignment stood on an easel in your room, bare to the world and bones only: a sketch done in thin, painstaking charcoal strokes, grey and faint on the yellowed canvas.

 

The curve of the sea, crests of waves rising jagged like mountain spires and small, squat hills; the bubbled blots of clouds, and a ship rising out of the centre, tall and proud, sails square to the wine, full and bursting as she rode over the top of the storm, thrown high into the air, the flags at the top scrapping the tip of the canvas.

 

The ship had a name, a story, you knew, but you had not cared to look.

 

Your next assignment - a commission, in fact, requested in hushed voices by a man with a purse full of gold and a crooked nose - lay wrapped in an old, soiled sheet in the corner of the room, face down on a shelf, away from any mice who might trot by. A portrait of Louis, le roi soleil, in all his splendour, all his velveteen glory, with his fleur-de-lis cloak and stacked horsehair wig and the tiny, insignificantly significant smile.

 

Enjolras could not see it; should not see it; and had. Had seen it and frowned, once, all your muscles tensing, your mind whirring as you waited, impatient and instantly fired-up, for the sharp lashes to land from his tongue, one after another after another.

 

Instead, he had sighed, closing his eyes for a brief second and a half.

 

"I do not want to argue," he had said, and you could hear the push in his voice, the strain there - it wanted to be a command, wanted to be demand and an insistence, but it failed, stumbling over into a plea, just as half-cast and odd and wrong as you were; not one thing or the other.

 

"As you wish, Apollo," you had agreed, simple and quick, for once devoid of any japes, any jests or tricks or laughs.

 

Peace between you was a miracle; you would not send it away at the door.

 

There was a muffled curse against your skin, pressed there by a warm mouth and a damp, wine-heavy tongue, and you laughed - three times in a day, would that this would never end! you prayed fervently - loud and clear and boisterous.

 

Objectionable, you thought a heartbeat after you had started, a sharp anxiety lancing through your spine and head and heart, but when you dared to look down and sideways as the gold-blond boy next to you, he was glaring in the narrow, pouting way you had come to realise was teasing, playful and toothless. Objectionable - but not, perhaps.

 

"I am tired of studying," he declared, sweeping the pages off your chest and onto the threadbare rug on the floor with a long, careless gesture, proud and wildly overzealous. "I will have no more of Bonaparte for to-day, I think."

 

"And whatever will you do instead? Watch me as I wander through the Bible?" you asked, a smile curling at the corners of your mouth, unbidden and unstoppable.

 

"Tell me, Grantaire," he said, definite and this, this was a demand; there was that tone, the ribbon through it, French blue and dotted with fleur-de-lis in gold thread. Your own little roi soleil... "Something I do not know."

* * *

_IV_

 

Blood-red and laced with faded gold, flushes of vermillion in his cheeks, he was godly even in anger: everything spilled out of him like rain down a riverbank, bursting the banks and flooding, leeching into the surrounding lands until the groan and sigh and die and the water slows to a halt, sated at last; words, passion, a thick stream of ire which steamed about his head as his long, long locks bounced around his shoulders, girlish and deceptively lovely.

 

You sat in mute silence, wondering at how it could to this - what had changed, what had fallen, what had crumbled elsewhere in the world - for him to be standing in your apartment, pacing up and down in scuffed leather boots, decrying some other poor soul or the governors of France or perhaps even God himself.

 

Perhaps you should have been listening, but you were too enraptured in watching him, in cataloguing all the details of Apollo angered you always missed when he was slicing you to shreds with quick, deft blows: how he glared and stared, daring his audience to disagree, to say something more on the subject; how he gestured sharp and firm, slapping hand against hand to make a point; how he drew taller, brighter, dragging your eyes to him helplessly.

 

A hunter on the prowl, you thought, and sketched a wolf in mid-stalk, yellow eyes cunning and glowing; you might paint it later, fill in it with thousands of grey tints, flecks of black and deep, dark green for the leaves and plants; and a glorious yellow-white for the eyes, luminous and watching, waiting.

 

The noise faded into the background, a dim buzz and clatter against the humming inside your head, and you turned the charcoal over in your hands, black clouds printing into your skin here and there in stains you knew would take days to wash off with soap and the trickle of cold, brown-tinted water you could get from the tap. It was familiar, soothing in a way which struck you as odd, as strange, but you did not deign to fight or argue with; you were a strange person, had been ever since you were a boy, caught as you were between your mother's world and your father's, trapped in the spirals of inequity and temptation, rising up only to sink back down again.

 

And then Enjolras. Apollo. Glorious, blossoming, burning Apollo - he was in himself an entirely different thing. More than temptation and nothing less than holy.

 

If you could only have one God, you thought, the jest curling the edges of your mouth - a jest, a jest, you told yourself endlessly when you were awake at the small hours of the day; just a jest and nothing more - you would choose him.

 

"You are not listening," Enjolras' voice broke through your reverie, and you startled, dropping the charcoal onto the page. There would be a smudge left, a block of black right in the belly of the wolf.

 

When you glanced up, anticipating rage, anticipating that the tumbling weight of his fury would now fall on your shoulders, broad and battered as they were, you saw instead that he was deflated, exhausted; something akin to embarrassment hid in the flecks of his eyes and the line of his jaw.

 

"Come," you said to him, reaching out a hand and tugging him closer quicker when he came, reaching immediately for his trousers.

 

"No!" Enjolras shouted, sudden and leaping and laced with a fear which jolted you. His arm hit a bottle and it smashed on the ground; neither of you looked at it, flinched at all. "You said you understood. That it was only once - just to... to try, to see what it... you understood - why would you?"

 

You had never seen him wordless, even when you had taken him to bed and shown him what it meant to be wild, to fall for a sin the Church detested above almost all others; even then he had been composed, in control, if wonderfully, delightfully compliant.

 

You did not like seeing him wordless; you felt sick in the base of your stomach, throbbing and sour.

 

"I know," you said quietly, banishing all thoughts of jests and japes and sly, witty comments for the time being. This was the moment - you would make it or break it, and whatever was said you could not take back. "I do understand. I do," you added when he scowled, a hasty retort unfurling on his lips. "I did not - I did not intend that. Merely... I thought perhaps a bath might relax you, calm you. My mother, she used to swear by it when I was a child. In the sea, but the principle mayhap would be the same in a tub."

 

Rabbit-like and gamely nervous, he studied you for a trio of heartbeats longer and then nodded, assenting.

 

"Let me kiss you," you begged, searching for some kind of assurance that you were forgiven; that your mistake was forgiven. You should have spoken first - you knew that; to a wordsmith, always words first.

 

Another nod, and you kissed him briefly, chastely.

 

His hands, shaking ever so slightly with a nervousness you had not known he possessed, darted up to his collar to untie his cravat.

 

"Fetch the water," he ordered, the words quicker than he meant them, jumping but somehow steady, firm, composed. "And a towel."

* * *

_V_

 

A crack and a fizz in the darkness, the smell of smoke - acrid and thin, a piteous little thing - and you stirred, roused out of sleep by the trio of changes around you, small and meaningless as they were. You turned on your side, pressing your face into the plump pillow (your prized possession, or so you claimed often enough that the truth of it had long since lost all meaning) and your arms drifting up through space, warm and piled with blankets to rest under your chin. Sluggish, you dozed still, caught somewhere between awake and asleep, lost in a mirage of dreams you could not quite recall even then; something beautiful, that you were sure of.

 

You had returned to the sea, then, only a few moments later, sinking your toes into the warm, grainy sand, delighted by the contrast between the white-yellow of it and brown of your skin, your hair cut short and close to your head like it had been in your youth, before you had tried to grow it out, wear it long and straight like a proper, traditional Frenchman did; in your memory, the salt crisped in your hands as the water dried, the smell of it reaching you from so far away, and you ran along the oscillating, undulating line where the water lapped at the beach, snake-like and shifting, your trousers rolled up so your legs were half-bare and your shirt forgotten somewhere behind you...

 

Then a breath, floating along the air, pushed and quick, and more smoke, tickling at your nose, making you wrinkle and your mouth twitch, irritated and jumping.

 

You turned, eyes scrunched shut and waited, breathing slow and deep and foggy, until you felt awake enough, alive and unscrambled enough to focus - and then, only then, did you open your eyes.

 

"Lord, what wonders have I done, what sins have I committed, to cause you to send me this, of all blessings, on this of all days?" you murmured, sleep muffling your voice, but nothing of the reverence or the low, rough scratches etched into it.

 

"You speak often of sin - perhaps it was that?" Enjolras whispered in response, settled now in your chair on the opposite side of the room, bundled up in one of your shirts, a pair of trousers rolled-up at the hem and a trio of blankets in different, mis-matching colours and patterns, his hair a tangled cloud around his head, and a pile of papers already in his hand.

 

You missed him; you wanted him back beside you; you wanted to forbid him to move, take up a paintbrush and a lump of charcoal and sketch him out, ink him in with spots and dashes off colour.

 

You did not move: you could hear the rain falling onto the roof of your leaky, crumbling apartment, and the room was dim enough that if you closed your eyes it was midnight again, dark and shadowed.

 

"It is almost morning," Enjolras added, hushed and apologetic. "I did not mean to wake you so early - I only thought to read a little in the peace."

 

"Do not apologise to me, Apollo, or you will break the chains binding the Titans to their pits," you commented swiftly, jesting and darting, fencing with words and a point-covered blade, fingers curling on the pillow, grabbing at the blankets to clutch them to your chest like a child, foetal and protected. "Then Zeus will have no choice but to throw me from Olympus again, and what will I do lost in the wilderness?"

 

Apollo frowned, brow furrowed and running a hand, briefly, through a knot of curls at the side of his throat, knuckles gripping the pages tight.

 

You had forgotten, had you not, how he loathed it when you slaughtered yourself, offering yourself to him like a lamb on the altar. Such a warrior-prince he would only ever wield the blade himself, find the cut and the thrust on his own; never deigning, never stooping to borrow yours.

 

The silence was swift and heavy, a sudden onslaught of nothing, and you wondered if you'd gone too far, if the precious, unsteady truce you had built between you would fall.

 

"I brought you a gift," Enjolras said eventually, but the grating, discordant chime in his voice was still there - echoing with the words he held back, hissing like poison on the back of his tongue. "I did not know if I should, but I am told it is the custom at this time of year."

 

"I would have accepted your presence as a gift," you told him, sitting up them, and noting how his eyes lingered on your chest, on where the blanket bunched at your waist; you were not a vain man - what ugly man could be? - but you felt a jolt of golden, liquid glory whenever Enjolras looked at you like that, all gleaming and smiling and studiously memorising. "But if you have brought it, I will not send you away with it - I would be a poor host to be so dismissive. Have at it, then, Apollo: give me my gift."

 

With the candle in its silver holder in one hand and something dark and wrapped in cloth in the other, stout and long-necked, Enjolras made his way over, picking the path through the dim light easily - as though he knew it, you thought, as though he knew it well enough he did not need to see it, but you chased those thoughts from your head before you were swallowed by their folly - to sit on the end of your bed, carefully setting down the candle between you, a pool of light spilling out onto the green woollen blankets, deep and verdant.

 

Out of the wrappings, then, came a bottle, stoppered with a thick cork and the label around it read a name you recognised - a name you knew, but had never seen yourself, let alone tasted.

 

"I liberated it from my father," Enjolras admitted, a rose-pink blush stealing up his cheeks, dyed a darker colour by the soft light. "But I thought... perhaps you might like to try?"

 

"If you permit it, Apollo," you smiled, reaching past the bottle - past the bottle, was that not a first for you? A miracle, again! You had been blessed, you were certain - to him and kissing his cheeks, one then the other, taking your time with it, lingering, slow and tender, over each one.

 

You did not kiss him; you would kiss him when you both tasted of champagne, bubbled and star-struck and white-gold crackling against the roof of your mouths, but not then.

 

"I do permit it," he said, steady and low, and you were undone: lost and found at once; you did not know what he meant, but it did not matter.

 

Outside, the clock chimed four in the morning, clattering and peeling, puncturing the faint, juddering bubble you had erected around the two of you, and Enjolras tugged the cork from the bottle, white foam cascading over the sides in a rush, spurting out like water from a fountain, over rocks, fizzing and sparkling as it went, glinting like liquid diamonds.

 

The white candle, the last of your advent candles, flickered, a drop of wax plummeting to the base.

 

You laughed and Enjolras smiled and the first taste of champagne was a cacophony of stars in your mouth.

 

_(Joyeux Noël.)_


End file.
